Asako Fujioka is an independent consultant and producer with a focus on strengthening the creative documentary genre in Asia. She has worked with the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival since 1993 as Coordinator, Director of the Tokyo Office, and now Vice-chair on the Board of Directors. She advised and served on the selection committees of the Asian Network of Documentary (AND) at the Busan International Film Festival, DMZ Docs Industry program, and Tokyo Docs, and has been on international juries of Berlin (Forum), Sundance, Hong Kong, and many other festivals. As head of Documentary Dream Center, she launched the filmmaker residency Yamagata Documentary Dojo in 2018 from where many international award-winning films have emerged. She helps Japanese films liaison internationally and aims to foster an international exchange for documentaries, their makers and audiences. She is the producer of Nude at Heart (2021, dir: Okutani Yoichiro) and handles the international distribution of Tokyo Uber Blues (2023, dir: Aoyagi Taku) and other documentaries.
IDA: Please tell us a little about yourself and your profession or passion.
Growing up in New York and Duesseldorf in a Japanese family, I developed a longing for the unknown Japan and Asia where I imagined all my adolescent anxieties of identity would instantly be resolved. When I moved to Tokyo at 18, that did not happen. However, the economic bubble opened opportunities for the expansion of art-house cinemas, and a range of art forms, from around the world was introduced to the Japanese public. I was fascinated. I also fell in love with rural Thailand, my entry point to larger Asia. My first job after college was at Cine Saison, one of the earliest commercial distributors of the art-house films. We were working with the early works of Hou Hsiao Hsien, Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch, as well as Louis Malle, Eric Rohmer, Idrissa Ouedraogo, and other auteurs. We also released Michael Moore’s Roger and Me and Christine Choy’s Who Killed Vincent Chin? in our cinemas.
IDA: When did you first start working in the documentary field?
When I became disillusioned with the commercialized marketing and packaging of film as a product rather than film as art, I started working for a documentary photographer. Shortly afterward, I discovered the wonderful world of creative documentary, an eye-opening kind of cinema, at the Yamagata Film Festival, an emerging international event far from Tokyo in the mountains of northern Japan. This became the “home” I’d been searching for.
IDA: You have worked with the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) since the early 1990’s. Tell us a little about the growth of YIDFF and how it evolved into being one of the most exciting and impactful gatherings in the non-fiction field!
Yamagata launched in 1989 at an exciting time for the documentary field, when new approaches and styles were being explored, and the restraints on freedom of expression were being untied by democratic movements – in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block and in many Asian nations. From the earliest edition, the selection of films was daring and genre-bending. We presented manically extensive thematic and retrospective programs on topics like the U.S. and Japanese propaganda films during WWII, indigenous people’s filmmaking, or scientific films which were as sensual and aesthetic as were educational. We did focuses on Joris Ivens, Robert Kramer, Guy Debord, Chris Marker (the first major one), and more. YIDFF’s history was fueled by the amazing rise of creative docs around Asia, and as Japan is one of the few Asian countries with a history of documentary filmmaking since the 1930s, our well-curated programs looking back on Japanese work and publications in English and Japanese were highly appreciated. (YIDFF Archive)
Yamagata also became known as a comfortable place for socializing and meeting people, where all filmmakers, film professionals, film fans, and locals were welcomed equally at the festival hangout (and became equally drunk) every night. It became, even for the Japanese film industry, a place where people gathered for the sake of their love for cinema and not because of work obligations or press coverage. It was a place for non-Japanese film professionals to discover Japan outside of its usual corporate or formal image. Encounters here have given birth to new films, as well as babies.
The next edition is October 2025 and our call for film entries is now open.
IDA: Tell us the origin story of Documentary Dream Center and your current role in the organization.
Documentary Dream Center came out from my concern for the sense of solitude and pressure on contemporary documentary filmmakers who researched, filmed, edited, and struggled to do everything by themselves. In Asia in the 1990s, an emerging wave of independent documentary filmmakers were bringing out stories from their own cultures, communities, and perspectives – issues and emotions that had not been accessible to outsiders before. But in working with the AND Fund at Busan Film Festival (Korea), I noticed that many promising Asian film projects that we awarded grants to seemed to be finishing prematurely. They had good subjects and unique perspectives, with lots of footage from years of filming, but the completed film seemed rushed and simply slapped together. The films were missing important background information that insiders would take for granted but outsiders wouldn’t understand. It was like the filmmaker got tired at the end of a long journey and stopped caring.
I hosted a series of workshops in remote places in Japan, Thailand, and China, where filmmakers had to communicate across cultures and work together. Working with each other and with mentors who were practicing filmmakers gave each other new perspectives and enthusiasm towards new approaches, structures, and editing styles. This evolved into the 4-week residency program Yamagata Documentary Dojo which is now in its seventh edition, offering Asian filmmakers working on new works a long-term stay to deepen their thinking through international exchange. The process of editing and structuring the footage after shooting is decisive in determining the direction of a documentary film. This program provides the time and place to enhance this stage of filmmaking.
IDA: Any advice for young producers who are just joining the field?
No film is the same as another, and each film-life should find different paths unique to each own. It means producers are never bored, and it also means you can never stop trying.
IDA: What is next for you? Are you working on anything you can share with us?
In October, Yamagata IDFF will be running its touring program in Tokyo cinemas, showcasing 50 films from last year’s edition across five weeks. The Yamagata Documentary Dojo 7 will open applications in November for its February 2025 residency program. Tokyo Uber Blues will be broadcasted this season (in October) on American PBS under the prestigious POV label, preceded by physical screenings in cinemas in LA, USC and New York this fall. My upcoming challenge is to theatrically release and distribute across Japan, some of the award-winning documentaries that came out of past Dojo programs. They include Scala (2022 / Ananta Thitanat, Thailand), After the Snowmelt (2023 / Lo Yi-Shan, Taiwan/Japan), Xixi (2024 / Fan Wu, Taiwan/Philippines), Monisme (2023 / Rial Rizaldi, Indonesia). Many of our Japanese alumni have already successfully made their domestic theatrical runs.